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ALP 306: What the Agency AI Survey results mean for PR and marketing firms
May 2500:22:31Tap to summarizeThe SAGA Agency AI Survey results are in, and small agency owners are feeling great about AI. Maybe too great. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into the numbers and find the gap between how owners think they’re using AI and the reality of what’s happening inside their businesses. The headline figures look impressive: 89% of respondents report regular or widespread AI use, 74% use it daily, and 88% say they’ve seen productivity gains. But Chip isn’t buying it. He questions whether the sample skews toward early adopters, or more likely, whether agency owners simply don’t have a clear enough picture of what “good” AI use looks like elsewhere. When 53% say they’re ahead of their peers but only 13% say they’re behind, the math doesn’t work. As Gini puts it, they’re probably grading themselves on usage habits, not operational depth. Next, Chip and Gini look at what agencies are actually doing with AI. Most activity falls squarely into what Chip calls “generative AI 101” — drafting emails, writing social posts, generating blog content. The more interesting stuff is largely absent. AI-assisted design work barely registers. Only 74% are even using AI to revise or edit content, a number both hosts find inexplicable given how easy and useful that is. Gini’s own example of running an article through an AP style agent before sending it to a notoriously precise editor at PR Daily illustrates exactly the kind of practical, low-friction habit that should be universal by now. Another data point they discuss is the disconnect between productivity gains and revenue. Agencies report getting faster, but their top-line numbers are flat or down. Gini’s read is that AI efficiency is getting absorbed into existing scope rather than converted into new value. Agencies are over-servicing clients at the same fees, filling freed time with more of the same work instead of building something new. On the pricing side, almost no one reported clients pushing for discounts tied to AI use. Instead of a reduction in cost, the larger enterprise clients are asking about data governance, usage policies, and procurement compliance. Chip advises unless your agency has the infrastructure to manage those requirements consistently, that’s a market best left to someone else. [read the transcript] The post ALP 306: What the Agency AI Survey results mean for PR and marketing firms appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.
Transcribe →FIR #515: Agents Everywhere
May 2501:47:40Tap to summarizeEmployees at the Pentagon have spun up over 100,000 AI agents. In the private sector, we’re seeing reports of 10,000 or more agents being deployed by employees at a variety of companies. The problem is that most organizations lack governance to address agents, and the problems this explosion of agents operating on employees’ behalf can cause are innumerable. In the long-form FIR episode for May 2026, Neville and Shel delve into the rise of agents, the harms they could cause, what companies should do to ensure these agents deliver benefits rather than problems, and how communicators can take a leading role in addressing the issue. Also in this episode: AI copyright lawsuits are coming for communicators Google’s search overhaul could signal a post-citation era Placing your thought newsmakers, thought leaders, and subject matter experts on podcasts is becoming a standard media relations practice “I worked all weekend” is no longer an argument for the fees you charge Short-form video clippers are creating go-to content from long-form videos — including yours Dan York outlines the big enhancements in WordPress 7.0 Links from this episode Slopaganda, the New Rules of Narrative Warfare AI Copyright Lawsuits Pose Growing Risk for Communicators Practical Considerations for Managing IP Risk in AI-Generated Content Best Practices for Mitigating Copyright Risks in AI-Generated Content AI in Litigation Series: An Update on AI Copyright Cases in 2026 Powered by A.I., Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years Google Search as You Know It Is Over Why Podcast Placements Are the New Press Coverage Including Podcasts in Your PR Strategy Podcast Guesting vs. Traditional PR: What Works in 2026 U.S. Newsroom Employment Has Fallen 26% Since 2008 U.S. Podcast Consumption Reaches Record High: The Infinite Dial 2025 You Can’t Beat AI. Steve Rubel on AI, Media Analytics, and the Future of PR AI and the End of Billable Hours The Clipping Economy: How Short-Form Video “Clippers” Are Overrunning the Internet How Short-Form Clips Took Over the Internet The Clipping Economy The Case for and Against Clipping Inside the “Clipping Farms” Driving Fintech’s Marketing Boom Companies Have a New AI Problem: Too Many Agents Businesses Will Have Over 150,000 AI Agents by 2028, Says Gartner AI Agents Introduce a New Class of IT Management Challenges Why Most Enterprise AI Agents Will Fail — And What Leaders Are Missing How Smart Governance Can Contain Agentic Sprawl Six Capabilities Enterprises Need to Scale Agentic AI in 2026 Pentagon Workers Vibe-Code 100,000 AI “Agents” to Use on Unclassified Networks Links from Dan Yorik’s Tech Report Turn Your Blog Posts Into Podcast Episodes Google Search as you know it is over Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years WordPress 7.0 Field Guide AVFTCN 040 – Returning From A Hiatus, and Plans for 2026 The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript Neville Hobson: Hi everyone and welcome to the For Immediate Release podcast long-form episode 515 for May 2026. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and we have six really interesting reports to share with you today. And not all of them are about AI. I’m not saying most of them aren’t, but a couple are on other topics of interest to communicators. Also have a really excellent report from Dan York looking at the latest upgrade to WordPress, a massive upgrade, one of the most significant upgrades WordPress has seen in some time, and Dan’s report is fascinating as he talks about this. But we are going to start by filling you in on a new podcast on the FIR Podcast Network. We haven’t had a new show on the network in a while. You know, we started this as just FIR and we needed a place to house multiple FIR shows. Those who have been listening a long time may remember FIR book reviews and FIR speakers and speeches. And we had a number of these. And then we had some people say, hey, can my podcast live on your network? And we said, as long as it has something to do with communications, sure. So all of them have pretty much faded except a couple that Chip Griffin continues to crank out, but now we have a new one. And the reason we have a new one is because I’m doing it as a new podcast by me and my longtime friend and colleague, Steve Crescenzo. And it is called On the Same Page. It is an internal communications focused podcast. We’re recording it twice a month, about 20, 25 minutes per episode. And each episode focuses on an element of the strategic internal communications framework that I developed. It was several years ago. It was actually before I took a job in the private sector again. I’ll have been at the company I work for now nine years in October. So yeah, I developed this a long time ago. Then I wrote 28 blog posts about it. Somebody said, turn it into a book. So I did. And I have found a publisher for that book. So the podcast and the book are companion pieces and the first episode of On the Same Page is out now. You can find it on the FIR ...
Transcribe →FIR #514: Was Twitter A One-And-Done Phenomenon?
May 1900:27:59Tap to summarizeThere’s a concept circulating in Platformer, the Reuters Institute, and Nieman Lab: the text-based social networks that defined the last 15 years of public communication may be in irreversible decline. Apptopia reports that Bluesky’s daily users are down 96% from January 2024; Threads has lost users in seven of the past eight months (down 61% from its October 2024 peak); and X has been “culturally altered.” At its peak, was Twitter less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history? The mass audience has moved to short-form video, algorithmic feeds reward attention over the social graph, and platforms increasingly refuse to be referral engines. Text still thrives in newsletters, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and AI chat interfaces — what’s collapsing isn’t text, but giant algorithmic public feeds. Neville and Shel look at what this means for communicators: the promise of scale is giving way to relevance, trust, and consistency — a shift that requires a different approach to brand presence on social. Get details in this not-so-short midweek FIR episode. Links from this episode: Are the Twitter clones in trouble? Pew: Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 Pew: Social Media and News Fact Sheet Reuters: Mapping news creators and influencers in social and video networks The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript Neville: Hi everybody, and welcome to For Immediate Release episode 514. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. Communicators devote a fair amount of time to social media management. It’s no different where I work. We’re a smaller team in the construction industry, so we don’t have any dedicated social media resources. But whether it’s a company like mine, where it’s part of the job that somebody does, or a global brand like Wendy’s or Starbucks with a full-blown team, everyone’s trying to make an impact on social network users. The strategy behind those efforts may need an overhaul, though, to address the decline of text-based social networks. Platformer’s Casey Newton wrote about this recently, focusing on Threads, Bluesky, and X — but I think it’s fair to throw Facebook into the mix. Depending on whose numbers you believe, Threads has lost momentum, Bluesky never became the Twitter replacement that political journalists or media folks had hoped it would be, and X is, well, shall we say, culturally altered. Meta and Bluesky dispute some of this third-party data, so I don’t want to overstate the precision of the numbers, but we shouldn’t shrug off the larger point. This isn’t about whether Threads beats X or whether Bluesky can recover, but rather about whether that old Twitter model can be rebuilt at all. And increasingly, the answer looks like probably not. Twitter at its peak was a real-time public layer for news, commentary, expert reaction, and professional visibility. Journalists, politicians, academics, CEOs, and PR people were all there reacting to each other in public. That gave communicators something we had never really had before: a live dashboard of what influential people were saying, what stories were breaking, and how publics were interpreting events in real time. The problem is that this depended on a specific set of conditions — a text-first interface, a public follow graph, a tolerance for public argument, and a shared assumption that this was where you went to see what was going on. Even with a small subscriber base compared to Facebook and a lot of other networks, Twitter was where news broke, and it was frequently cited in the mainstream media’s reporting. Well, those conditions have changed. The mass audience has moved heavily toward video. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are now the primary discovery platforms for younger users in particular. News and commentary arrive as video, personality, remix, and clip. In fact, I was talking about this recently with someone I work with who said she doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live — she watches 10 or 15 of the clips that Saturday Night Live shares on YouTube so she can catch the funniest bits. At the same time, the logic of the feed has changed. The old social feed was built around who you followed. The new algorithmic feed is built around what holds attention. A post on early Twitter spread because of the social graph. A video on TikTok spreads because the system thinks it’ll keep people watching. Now that changes the incentives. It rewards performance, emotion, personality, and visual fluency. It’s also why the link-in-the-post model is fading. Social platforms don’t want to be referral engines. They want the content consumed inside the platform. You can’t conflate social engagement and site traffic anymore. For brands, this requires a pretty significant rethink. Today, social is less about sending people somewhere else and more about creating native moments of value right there, inside the feed. The implication for communicators is that we can’t just ask, “What should we post?” We have to ask, “What role does each of these platforms play in our communication ecosystem?” Some platforms are for discovery, some for reputation, some are mostly listening posts — environmental scanning, sentiment tracking, intelligence gathering. Some platforms may not be worth the effort at all anymore. We also need more human voices. The logo account is not adequate anymore. Trust attaches to people — experts, leaders, practitioners, analysts. That doesn’t mean every executive needs to be dancing on TikTok. In fact, please, no. But organizations do have to get better at helping credible people communicate in platform-native ways. The decline of the old public square forces us to build more durable relationships. What matters? Newsletters, podcasts, owned communities. LinkedIn still matters for professional audiences. So I’d resist the lazy conclusion that text is dying. Text is everywhere — in newsletters (which, by the way, is where I latched onto this story, in Casey Newton’s Platformer), in captions, in scripts, in search results. What’s dying is something more specific: the idea that a text-first social network can serve as the default global town square. Twitter may have been less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history. For communicators, the job is no longer to master the town square. The job is to understand the map after that square has gone to seed. Neville, is this what you’re saying? Neville: It’s a lot. There’s a lot going on here to kind of zero in on a handful of potential responses, I suppose. But one thing does seem to be quite clear from all that you’ve outlined, which I believe is the case: Twitter probably was historically unique. And I think the issue, or an issue, is that everyone doesn’t think like that. They think it’s repeatable, it’s replicable. And it’s not. I think you could also see AI maybe accelerating the decline. Content abundance — so much of it. Authenticity is getting really difficult to judge. And everywhere is noisy. And that’s not what many people want. So I guess, to crystallize it in a sense — you know, we’ve got all these elements you mentioned. The paradox of Bluesky: it hasn’t grown. Threads has got scale, but it doesn’t really have a big identity. It’s kind of part of Meta. What does it all mean for communicators? We’ll come back to that, I’m sure, in a bit. But I wonder — the thought that keeps recurring in my mind from everything I’ve read about this is that the decline may not be about text at all. That’s not to say it’s because they’ve all migrated to YouTube and video platforms. I don’t believe that’s the case either. I think, as you pointed out, and that’s obvious to all of us, the text itself isn’t disappearing. People talk about the decline of text-based social networks. But the audience hasn’t vanished. They’re just dispersed. They’re elsewhere. They’re not in a central place. There is no public square — no global publ...
Transcribe →ALP 305: How agency owners can use AI as an always-on thought partner
May 1800:16:22Tap to summarizeMost agency owners know AI can write a first draft or clean up copy. Far fewer have figured out how to use it as the strategic sounding board they’ve always needed. In this episode, Chip and Gini explore how to use AI tools as a thought partner, not just a content machine. Gini’s example is a client who asked her to map what a PESO model maturity ladder would look like for an organization. She described the situation and constraints to Chat GPT, and keep pushing the conversation forward. Six weeks of iterative back-and-forth surfaced ideas she wouldn’t have reached on her own, including finding the gaps when the AI was willing to poke holes in her thinking. Chip points out that for owner-led agencies, that 8pm Friday idea you don’t want to dump on your team now has somewhere to go. The tool doesn’t care what time it is, and it has no stake in whether your idea succeeds or embarrasses you. Both hosts advise to direct the AI to ask you questions rather than just answer them. It takes some coaching to get a tool that genuinely engages rather than validates everything you propose, but once you’re there, you start getting real value. One warning they have is that these tools are not always consistent. The same AI that helped you build a strategy three weeks ago might question it today with equally compelling reasoning. Stay in the driver’s seat, and treat AI-generated recommendations as input, not conclusions. [read the transcript] The post ALP 305: How agency owners can use AI as an always-on thought partner appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.
Transcribe →Managers As A Communication Channel
May 1400:27:02Tap to summarizeWelcome to the first-ever episode of On the Same Page, the new employee communication podcast from communication veterans Shel Holtz and Steve Crescenzo. In this first episode, Shel and Steve tell their origin story, recount how this podcast came to be, what listeners can expect, and riff on how to tap into managers to help support communication to their team members. We hope you’ll participate in the show by sharing your comments, questions, experiences, and anecdotes by sending an email to fircomments@gmail.com (include an audio clip; we’ll play it), or commenting on this page or on the announcement posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, or BlueSky. As you can see below, you can also watch the YouTube video version of the show. Raw Transcript: Shel Holtz: If your managers are improvising messages, you don’t have a communication strategy, you have a rumor pipeline. Steve Crescenzo: Manager communications — one of the most misunderstood and ignored parts of employee communications, but one we need to pay attention to. But before we get there, welcome to the first-ever episode of On the Same Page. Shel Holtz: Now, factoring managers into communication is the kind of challenge, Steve, you and I are going to be talking about here on this brand spanking new internal comms podcast. Steve Crescenzo: I prefer to say employee comms podcast show, but we’ll be sure to be talking about that as we go. Yeah, we’ve obviously launched this podcast for communicators primarily, but we’re also hoping some managers listen in, some executives, some leaders, some CEOs — they could all benefit from what we’re going to be talking about, right? Shel Holtz: Absolutely. This is for anybody who’s engaged in communication inside the organization, whether it’s the formal communication that is the work of we employee communicators, or just people who know that they have to do it, whether that’s senior executives or department managers or whomever. But we’ll cover one dimension of employee comms, internal comms, whatever you want to call it — EC/IC — in each episode. Steve Crescenzo: Yep, exactly right. And yeah, you know, if you work in an organization, you have to communicate. You may not do it for a living, but you have to communicate. So why don’t we tell the gang where — you and I have known each other for 30 years, 32 years, something like that. And we’ve talked about this before, and we always say we’re going to do it. We never do it. You’re already doing podcasts, and I’m lazy. I’m like, this is extra work. I never give myself extra work. But this is the right time to do it. Why do you think I finally caved and you finally said, you know, we need to carve out time for this. Why now? Shel Holtz: Well, there’s a couple of reasons. Some are based on what’s going on in the world right now, and some are based on the fact that I’m working on a book that covers all this. And it has the same title as this podcast. The topics we’re going to cover come from the framework from this book. The book is a framework for internal comms — employee… I call it employee communications in the book, by the way. And I do that for a very specific reason. I got some pushback on that from one of the internal communications experts, thought leaders out there, whom I asked to review it. And he said, call it internal comms, don’t call it employee comms because there are other audiences that are internal besides employees. And I said, yeah, but this book is just for communicating with employees because they are, as Roger D’Aprix called them, informed insiders. Those other people, the contractors that come in and are embedded in the organization — yeah, they’re there, they’re getting a lot of that internal messaging, but they’re accountable to the values and the purpose of the company that they work for, the one that pays them. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, they have their own mission and values and everything. Yeah, I’m glad you stuck to your guns on that, Shel. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I do think internal communicators need to factor in those audiences, those stakeholders, but not for the purposes of the book that I wrote. That’s really aimed at employees. The framework came when I was an independent consultant. I haven’t been one of those for — it’ll be nine years in October. It really is. The older you get, the faster that time goes by. But when I was doing independent consulting, I found myself sort of reinventing this on every engagement, particularly on internal communication audits. And I said, this is ridiculous. If I just had the framework fleshed out, I could just pull it out and I could do the audit report much more quickly. So I sat down and I came up with it, and I worked with a few other people to get their thoughts. And finally I had it in front of me and I said, it looks like there’s about 28 elements of this. I ought to flesh these out. So I did a blog post for each of them. And about halfway through, somebody said, you are going to turn this into a book, aren’t you? And I said, well, I hadn’t thought about that. But now that I have, yeah, I will. So that took — yeah, all of this has taken 15, 16 years since I first sat down and hammered out the framework. And I mean, I had some great help. Brian O’Mara-Croft actually did the visuals to take my terrible graphic and turn it into something that looked nice. Steve Crescenzo: Hello, Brian. Hello, Brian. Well, I’m very lucky in that I’m one of the rare people who’ve read the book and really, really love the book. And when you said you wanted to start a podcast to further explore the topics in that book, I was all over it. Now, there’s so much to cover, but we’ve got the rest of our lives, Shel, right? Well, I’m not going anywhere. You got at least five years left, right? Shel Holtz: My dog has at least five years left and I don’t want to leave her alone. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, when he goes, you go, probably. But we’re gonna try to stick to, what, about 20 minutes? I mean, that’s hard for me and you. I think that’s gonna be hard. That’s gonna be our biggest challenge. I’ll tell you that right now. I got a lot to say, and I want a lot to learn from you, and I got a lot of opinions, so it’ll be tough to stick to 20 minutes, but we can. Shel Holtz: It will. We’ll try. My view on the length of podcasts — and anybody who’s listened to FIR already knows this — is that they should be as long as it takes to say what you wanted to say, as long as it remains interesting for the people who are listening. If people are going, my God, they’re just droning on and on, I’m going to go listen to something else, then… Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I always get the question in my writing workshops about how long can an online article be? And I said, as short as humanly possible without leaving anything important out. That’s it. Not an extra word after that. Shel Holtz: I think that’s a great answer. So we’re going to shoot for 20 minutes. If we go over, we’ll go over. If during the editing process I think I can make it shorter without leaving out anything that needed to be said, I’ll edit mercilessly. But the point here is to be entertaining and informative at the same time. And that’s why I wanted to do this with you, Steve — besides your experience with employee communications, all the various companies you’ve worked with, everything you’ve learned. I figure you and I are gonna host an entertaining show. Steve Crescenzo: Have some fun. We’ll have fun. These things aren’t worth it. We’re not getting paid, Shel. I don’t know if you realize that, but we’re not getting paid. Well, you gotta have fun. We’re love. So we’re gonna do one e...
Transcribe →FIR #513: Why Communications Must Build the Narrative Code for the Agentic Age
May 1100:34:10Tap to summarizeNeville and Shel dig into a provocative Harvard Business Review article that argues most marketing teams are structurally unprepared for the speed and scale that agentic AI now enables. The bottleneck, the authors contend, isn’t the technology; it’s the operating model. Neville and Shel connect the piece to conversations FIR has been having for the past year: AI as orchestration rather than automation, professionals shifting from supervisors of tasks to directors of systems, and 2026 increasingly framed as “the year of the agent.” At the center of the Harvard piece is the idea of a “brand code” — a machine-readable knowledge system that lets specialized AI agents continuously create, adapt, test, and optimize marketing in real time. Communications urgently needs its own equivalent: a “narrative code” containing executive voice profiles, message hierarchies, sensitive-topic guardrails, and escalation rules. Whoever builds it first, he warns, will inherit the agentic stack, and if marketing gets there first, comms will be stuck with a system never designed for crisis, controversy, or stakeholder complexity. The episode also includes some concrete examples and early thoughts on Hermes, Wispr Flow, and where human judgment still has to win. Links from this episode: Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age The Year of the Agent: What it means for the future of communications Google Summary: The Year of the Agent: What it means for the future of communications If you work in PR and you’re unsure how AI agents will help you, this should help. The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript Shel: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 513 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville: I’m Neville Hobson. Over the past couple of years, we’ve heard countless conversations about how AI is changing marketing and communication. Most of those discussions tend to focus on tools — faster content creation, better personalization, workflow automation, synthetic media, analytics — all the things AI can supposedly do more quickly and at greater scale than humans. A new article in Harvard Business Review published last week takes the discussion somewhere much bigger. Its argument is not simply that AI will improve marketing productivity. Its argument is that AI may fundamentally redesign how marketing organizations themselves operate. The article is called “Redesigning Your Marketing Organization for the Agentic Age,” and the authors argue that most marketing teams are structurally unprepared for the speed and scale AI now enables. The reasoning is interesting; we’ll look into this in a minute. AI has already accelerated software engineering and product development dramatically. Products, updates, campaigns, and features are being developed and shipped much faster than before. But marketing organizations, they argue, are still largely built around sequential workflows, siloed teams, approval chains, meetings, handoffs, and coordination-heavy processes. So even when AI speeds up individual tasks, the organization itself still moves slowly. In other words, the bottleneck isn’t necessarily the technology, it’s the operating model. What struck me reading this article is that in many ways it feels like the continuation of conversations we’ve already been having on FIR over the past year. About a year ago, Shel demonstrated some of the early agentic AI capabilities we were beginning to see emerge — systems that could move beyond simple chatbot interactions and actually take actions across workflows, tools, and platforms. At the time, it felt experimental, slightly futuristic, and maybe just a glimpse of where things might be heading. Since then, we’ve repeatedly returned to related themes on the podcast: AI as orchestration rather than just automation, and managers becoming directors of systems rather than supervisors of tasks, to name but two. Recently, the wider communications industry has been framing 2026 as the year of the agent, a fundamental shift from generative AI, which creates content based on prompts, to agentic AI, which acts autonomously to achieve long-term goals. The rise of such autonomous agents requires a focus on agentic orchestration, with professionals acting as AI engineers who guide, manage, and audit these digital employees. As we discussed on this podcast last year, communication departments will adopt a hybrid structure where humans focus on high-level strategy and creativity while AI agents handle high-volume procedural communication tasks at machine speed. We’re already seeing a marked impact on marketing and public relations. The Harvard piece explains how companies such as HubSpot and AWS have begun putting this model into practice. They say organizations are achieving measurable gains, with marketing materials adapted up to 98 times faster, unit costs reduced by 80%, and click-through rates increased up to 17 times. Research from BCG has demonstrated these benefits at scale. Organizations embedding agentic AI into marketing workflows, the research has found, can achieve up to a threefold increase in ROI, campaign speed, and content volume. That’s why this Harvard article feels so interesting to me. It doesn’t contradict any earlier conversations; it complements them. It takes many of the ideas we’ve been discussing conceptually and places them inside a concrete organizational model. The authors propose something they call an agentic marketing organization — essentially a system where humans and AI agents work together continuously across multiple layers of activity. At the center of this idea is what they describe as a brand code: a machine-readable knowledge system containing brand strategy, customer insights, messaging frameworks, business rules, governance structures, and operational guidance that both people and AI systems can understand and act upon. Once that foundation exists, specialized AI agents can continuously create, adapt, test, distribute, optimize, and report on marketing activity in real time. It’s a vision of marketing that starts to look less like a department and more like an operating system. But what really caught my attention wasn’t the technology itself so much; it was the shift in the role of the marketer. Because beneath all the platform architecture and workflow diagrams is a much deeper question: if AI increasingly handles execution, what becomes the real value of marketers and communicators? The article argues that value shifts away from production and toward judgment — setting intent, evaluating outputs, interpreting signals, shaping governance, and guiding how the system evolves. And that raises some fascinating questions for communicators. But first, Shel, your demo of those early agentic capabilities was about a year ago now. As I mentioned earlier, it felt experimental and slightly futuristic then. So what’s changed since then? Shel: It feels like ancient history now. If I were to look at that, I’d probably shake my head and say, “my God, that’s pretty primitive.” The way it worked was, it took a screenshot of every site it visited and then acted on the screenshot. So it was a very slow and tedious process. The video that I shared, I edited out all of the waiting time for it to go through all of this, because it showed you everything. And those days are long gone. That was clearly a demo. I don’t remember which of the AI models offered that — I think it was Anthropic — but it was just tedious and not all that functional. It did what it was supposed to do in the end, which was to create a spreadsheet with the information I’d asked for. It was some open-source spreadsheet that it used. I ran a similar exercise just last week using Claude Cowork. And this was for a piece somebody in our sustainability department wrote. It was about two projects that had achieved world-first certifications for zero waste, which is kind of a big deal in the construction industry. It’s one of the biggest contributors to landfills and the like, the industry is. So I’m looking to place this article. And what I did was, I told Claude Cowork that I wanted four subage...
Transcribe →ALP 304: Stop making sacrifices your agency doesn’t need you to make
May 1100:19:06Tap to summarizeMost agency owners think they’re doing their team a favor when they quietly absorb the painful, tedious, or time-consuming work. They’re likely not. In this episode, Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich look at the sacrifices owners make on behalf of their teams and why those sacrifices often create more problems than they solve. This isn’t about the occasional tactical sacrifice, it’s about the systemic ones: the conscious decisions to absorb entire categories of work because you’ve decided your team would find them too difficult, too unpleasant, or too much of a burden. Gini admits she’s guilty of it herself, sharing that a new COO sat her down with a list of tasks she’d been handling and told her she shouldn’t be doing any of them. The jobs weren’t glamorous, but they weren’t the owner’s job either. Chip extends this into two areas where owner sacrifice tends to do the most damage: new business development, where owners keep proposals and pitches entirely to themselves thinking they’re protecting team time, and org chart design, where flat structures are usually not a deliberate choice but the result of owners absorbing management responsibilities no one else wanted. Both patterns block team growth and overload the owner at the same time. Gini describes a practice she returns to every quarter, sorting her task list into three buckets — things only she can do, things she enjoys but probably doesn’t need to do, and things she absolutely should not be doing. The third list gets delegated immediately. Chip puts it like this: for everything on your plate, ask yourself why you are the one doing it. If there isn’t a good answer, stop doing it. [read the transcript] The post ALP 304: Stop making sacrifices your agency doesn’t need you to make appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.
Transcribe →CWC 113: How AI impacts PR agencies and solos (featuring Karen Swim and Michelle Kane)
May 600:23:35Tap to summarizeIn this episode, Chip is joined by Karen Swim and Michelle Kane of the That Solo Life Podcast for part one of a special crossover episode exploring the practical effects of AI on agencies, solos, and the communications industry. Karen and Michelle share their view that AI is no longer optional. Practitioners who resist it risk falling behind, while those who embrace it can dramatically expand their capabilities. The conversation goes beyond basic content creation, exploring how AI can elevate strategy, reinvigorate professional skills, and free up time for deeper, more creative thinking. Chip, Karen, and Michelle also discuss the importance of treating AI like a new employee — providing context, voice, and guidance to get the best results — and address common concerns around ethics, privacy, and copyright. They encourage communicators who haven’t revisited these tools recently to dive back in, as the technology has advanced rapidly and shows no signs of slowing down. [read the transcript] The post CWC 113: How AI impacts PR agencies and solos (featuring Karen Swim and Michelle Kane) appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.
Transcribe →ALP 303: Preparing for your agency’s group presentations and pitches
May 400:23:05Tap to summarizeIn this episode, Chip and Gini open with the analogy of Canadian doubles, the tennis format where two players face one. If your team outnumbers the prospect, you don’t project strength, you project awkwardness. But the conversation goes well beyond headcount. A little preparation goes a long way in making sure every seat on your side is justified. You’ll want to match expertise to whoever the prospect brought, which requires actually knowing who’s coming. Gini described a recent pitch where she reverse-engineered her attendee list based entirely on who was showing up from the prospect’s side. That’s not logistics, it’s strategy. And whoever is in the room during the pitch needs to be the person doing the work after the contract is signed — not a handoff to a team with no context and no ownership. Both Chip and Gini are emphatic that the meeting itself should not feel rehearsed like a school play. Agency owners who show up prepared to have a real conversation before pitching solutions will stand out. Harder for many owners is knowing when to keep quiet. Interjecting while a team member gives an imperfect answer undermines their confidence, signals to the prospect they can’t be trusted, and makes them rely on you. The debrief after the meeting is where the coaching happens. [read the transcript] The post ALP 303: Preparing for your agency’s group presentations and pitches appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.
Transcribe →FIR #512: The AI Shift in Executive Decision-Making
May 400:31:28Tap to summarizeWhile there’s no evidence that business leaders are outsourcing the most important decisions to AI, there are reports that many executives are relying on AI to make many — in fact, most — of their decisions. The implications for communications could be huge. Links from this episode: AI Is Changing More Than Work, It’s Rewiring Executive Decision-Making Inside the C-suite: How AI is quietly reshaping executive decisions AI and the future of human decision making C-Suite Executives Dominate AI Decision-Making as Strategy Becomes Priority Decision-Making by Consensus Doesn’t Work in the AI Era How AI Is Transforming the Way Executives Lead Leadership at a Turning Point: How AI Is Shaping Executive Decision-Making Can AI Make Executive Decisions? The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript Neville: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode 512 of For Immediate Release. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. The inspiration for this week’s report came from a post Brian Solis wrote recently. In it, he argued that AI isn’t just changing work — it’s rewiring how executives make decisions. Once Brian put that in my head, the trend started standing out in other things I was seeing. I’ll summarize the numbers and what they mean for communicators right after this. The numbers Brian pulled together are honestly alarming. A Confluent study of UK private sector leaders found that 62% of executives now use AI to make the majority of their decisions. That’s not some — it’s the majority. 70% say they second-guess themselves when AI disagrees with them, and 46% say they rely on AI more than their own colleagues. On the U.S. side, SAP’s research found that 44% of C-suite executives would reverse a decision they had already planned to make based on AI input. 74% place more confidence in AI advice than in the advice they get from family and friends. Meanwhile, McKinsey reports that 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investment over the next three years, but only 1% — 1 percent — describe themselves as mature in deployment. The money to pay for AI and a sort of blind trust in its abilities are racing ahead of the internal competence to use it. Now, I want to be clear before I go on. I’m not anti-AI, Neville — you know this. Anyone who listens to the show knows I’ve been beating the drum for AI as a tool for communicators and for business in general for a long time. AI as a thinking partner, a research assistant, a stress-tester for ideas — that’s enormously valuable. But there’s a meaningful difference between using AI to inform a decision and using AI to make the decision. And Brian puts this well: AI is becoming the new executive influencer. The problem is that it hasn’t earned that role, at least not yet. So let’s talk about what this means for those of us in communication, because the implications are everywhere. Start with employee trust. The implicit deal between an organization and its workforce is that the people at the top got there because they have judgment and experience and pattern recognition that the rest of us don’t have — or at least they’ve been able to employ it really well and get noticed by the people who promote you into those leadership decisions. That’s the story leadership tells, and it’s the story employees buy into. Now imagine the all-hands where the CEO announces a major restructuring, and somewhere in the Q&A, or worse, on Blind or Reddit a week later, it comes out that the decision was essentially handed to a chatbot. What happens to confidence in leadership? What happens to engagement? What happens to the social contract that says, follow me because I know where we’re going? You can’t credibly ask people to bring their full selves to work, as they say, while you’re outsourcing your own judgment to a language model. Now extend that to external stakeholders — investors, customers, regulators, the board. They’re paying, and in a lot of cases they’re paying a lot, for executive judgment. If a strategic call goes sideways — and you know that happens — the explanation that the AI suggested it isn’t going to land well. It’s going to sound like an abdication, because it is an abdication. And from a crisis communication standpoint, “we trusted the algorithm” is one of the worst defenses I can imagine. I don’t expect that anybody’s going to say that, but it doesn’t mean it’s not going to come out. Just ask anyone who’s worked an aviation incident, a financial services failure, or a healthcare AI misfire. Imagine the reaction when either the leader tells people, or they learn through a third party, that the afflicted stakeholder hears, “Well, that’s the decision the AI told me to make.” And there’s a third implication that I think communicators need to surface inside our organizations: the erosion of dissent. I find this particularly interesting and disturbing. Confluent found that 65% of leaders say decision-making has become less collaborative since adopting AI. The Harvard Business Review just ran a piece arguing that consensus is dead in the AI era. That may be — but debate isn’t consensus. Debate is the friction that exposes bad assumptions. It’s what didn’t happen at that auto manufacturer — I think it was Volkswagen with their emissions standards. They didn’t have the psychological safety to feel safe in dissenting against the decisions being made. In this case, we’re not even looking forward at the leadership level in some cases. If AI is pushing aside the colleague who would have pushed back, whatever process your organization had for dissent just stops functioning. And when dissent dies, so does the early warning system communicators rely on to spot reputational risks before they get out of control. So what do we do? A few things. We push for governance — and if you already have a governance model, push to revisit it. Your governance needs clear declarations of which decisions AI informs versus which ones it actually makes. We coach our executives to talk publicly about how they actually use AI, with appropriate humility, before the question gets asked for them. We build the internal narrative that human accountability is non-negotiable, no matter how good the model gets. And we keep reminding leadership that machine confidence isn’t the same as strategic clarity. Brian’s right: AI is a test of leadership. It’s also, increasingly, a test of communication. Neville? Neville: Well, just to set my position clear on this, too — I’ve been a drum-beater for AI as a research assistant, as a useful tool, since GPT first came out. The initial kind of hysterical enthusiasm was tempered over time, but I use the tool every single day in what I do for work, or for pleasure for that matter. So it’s something I believe strongly in. But I’ve got this, how could you say, in the back of my mind always — this thought that I don’t accept blindly anything the AI assistant tells me. If I’m researching something, for instance, I’m going to make a recommendation about something, let’s say, or I’m writing a report or even something relatively simple like an article for the blog. If I felt I wanted to say this and it’s telling me that, that’s a simple decision: I’m either going to follow it or not. Typically when that happens, I’ll ask it questions to further that angle. But this is something else, what Brian writes about. And The Register — I’ve read their piece — tempered with a bit of hysteria, it seems. I mean, thi...
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